Welcome to the February 2025 retrospective. A lot of work and studying has been done this month, and much more is to come.

Finishing up Dungeoneer

The first part of the month took an unexpected detour. As I mentioned in the previous retrospective, I wanted to bring some quality of life improvements to Dungeoneer, and I did by implementing a leaner design for all list views. However, a very important feature was missing: the ability to sync your Final Fantasy XIV character with Dungeoneer, so you don’t have to manually add your collection. At first, I started by using public libraries, and they mostly worked, but they were missing key information I needed. Therefore, I decided to implement a lean web scraping solution, which was my first time working with scraping in a very long time, allowing Dungeoneer to find characters, and see their collections.

The result is what I consider a finished product, and it is available on the Dungeoneer website. I think Dungeoneer is now a good, user friendly and feature-rich tool for Final Fantasy XIV players.

Delving deeper into Next.js’s App Router

In the last retrospective, I mentioned that I wanted to learn Svelte and SvelteKit. However, after some thinking, I realized it was better to focus on learning Next.js’s App Router on a deeper level. Better to specialize in one thing than to try to do everything at once. With that in mind, I started reading the official documentation, and applying them to Catalyst. I am happy to say that Catalyst is almost to full feature parity with the previous version, and it is now using parallel routes, layouts, server actions, etc. I also took to opportunity to temporarily move away from Prisma and learn Drizzle, and although I’m still not completely comfortable with it, I can already see how powerful it is.

What’s next?

During March, I will be working on getting the Next.js version of Catalyst to feature parity and then some. I expect this to take the brunt of the month, but I’m very hopeful about how the final product will turn out.

Thank you so much for reading, and see you back next month!